Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
22 published records
01 / belief
“I think an A is a business is dying and acquirer is something and then can become the most valuable business of all time, so that’s Apple.”
02 / observation
“Like in a time period when Amazon is down to like $5, because eBay’s business basically never dipped, so in retrospect, which we’ll get into, buying eBay was the way to go.”
03 / belief
“As we have told you guys many times on this show, Ben and I are both huge fans, Brian, of your work. It’s awesome and this has been so much I think even more fun than last time having you on the show.”
04 / belief
“I think we got to know each other like I totally was so geeked to do this because I was like, okay, I think we’re good together.”
05 / belief
“See, here’s what I would say. The rationale is that they’re buying the business line or the technology.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don't know, maybe we are talking back into a world where content is the most valuable.”
07 / uncertainty
“Culturally, I don’t know how interesting this is but those AOL cowboys move in, they try to tell the Time Warner guys “Okay, we’re going to run this like a tech company now.”
08 / observation
“I was going to say the only way this could be better for AOL is if they actually bought a growth company like eBay.”
09 / belief
“I think the melding of the format sort of like makes all three of us up our games a little bit, you know.”
10 / observation
“Then they had, because they had bought a browser called BookLink. But the point is, is that people aren’t sophisticated in ’96, ’97, ’98.”
11 / belief
“I think if I was going to try and rationalize it from Time Warner’s side, that’s what I would go with.”
12 / belief
“I have not read it at all but it is the top of my list to read and so I think since that’s my sort of gig, is the history of technology and things like that, I’m eager to learn about the minds that shaped information technology and Claude Shannon.”
13 / evaluation
“I think the other interesting thing to point out about AOL is it’s not a Silicon Valley Company.”
14 / evaluation
“Like it is incredible how the entire internet, everything that we know as sort of the open web and various different protocols and things on various different platforms are all just bundled within AOL and they were basically making all the revenue for that for a very long time before we started to unbundle it all into these separate services.”
15 / evaluation
“I love that image of like the, you know, Virginia suburbs, AOL and 80s and 90s guys being the original growth hackers.”
16 / evaluation
“I think I’m ready to put forth a grade. I think I give the acquisition a C for AOL shareholders because of that.”
17 / evaluation
“Like, if you're buying Facebook ads now and it’s not in any of the new formats, you're not jumping on whatever the new flashy thing is, like you can basically, depending on your category, understand what your cost of customer acquisition is going to be. And if you're AOL and you do a very brilliant marketing move of putting these CDs at the checkout where no digital company and really no company is doing their distribution, like it’s in movie theaters, it’s in blockbusters, like all these unconventional places and you're giving away something, the benefit of AOL is 100 hours or 1000 hours for free, like there’s so much that they can give away for free because it’s the internet and it’s software and it’s reduced marginal cost relative to hard goods that it’s shocking to people.”
18 / evaluation
“I think like I’ve given and we may have to go back and revise at some point, but I’ve given YouTube a C because like I was worried about the opportunity cost of focusing on that for Google when it was a breakeven business.”
19 / evaluation
“I mean, I would have to go like D or D- because I think had buying Time Warner destroyed AOL, then it’s an F.”
20 / evaluation
“To me, I would classify it as an “other” because I’m trying to wreck my brain here about any other deal we’ve covered on this show where the rationale for it has literally zero to do with the business.”
21 / evaluation
“Brian, if I may be so bold as to voice what I think you would say, this is actually an “other” because it's not necessarily acquiring, if anything, it’s maybe acquiring a business line but it’s like acquiring stability and liquidity.”
22 / evaluation
“I think there’s like a tick-tock thing here where first, everybody is free and open about their content being aggregated because, I mean, if you just look at what Disney was doing for the longest time, they’re like, “well, we create content and it needs to be viewed everywhere because we’re horizontal.”